Just a few disorganized musings this morning. This afternoon. Whatever…
In a rather short piece in The Grauniad, Samuel Moyn ponders whether just changing the personnel "back" to "mostly professionals" in foreign policy, as the Biden transition team appears to be doing, won't just repeat the errors of the past. Well, of course it will, but not for the reasons Professor Moyn posits: He displays little or no knowledge of what it took to "get ahead" in foreign policy starting in 1981, let alone of the distorting effect that has had.
Bluntly, the installation of natural-resource-pipeline patronage in the foreign-relations systems — formally, at State, and in foreign-relations-related positions in other agencies — severely limited who could get promoted, and thus noticed for those senior posts now. I watched this from "alongside" in a related agency, particularly the utterly bungled transition from all-anticommunist-all-the-time1 to advancing-American-economic-interests-through-message-control-and-bribery that began in 1985 and extended thereafter in every Administration. Some highly respected, and highly respectable, people (like "Ambassador-selectee" Thomas-Greenfield) managed to nonetheless maintain careers inside that apparatus. Many worthies, however — often those who thought that the business of foreign policy was, well, foreign policy (and not Exxon's shareholder valuation) — did not. And I don't see much sign of considering them. For anything.
But they'll be just fine,2 I hope. There is perhaps no element of the executive branch in American government that so desperately relies upon the willingness of those who actually know to speak truth to power. I'm neither particularly encouraged nor, parallel to Professor Moyn, particularly discouraged by what I'm seeing thus far from President-elect Biden's team. And it's largely Nixon's fault, but that's for another time.
- How'd that end up working for American interests in the long run, Mr Roosevelt? (No, this ignoramus, not a President.) Or even the short run, since you didn't accurately identify the communists?
- Even if Lt Col (Ret) Vindman is considered "unconfirmable," naming him as a Permanent Professor of Ethics and International Relations at West Point and the National War College would be appropriate… and would not require Senate confirmation. Perhaps the political price of reappointing him to the National Security Council would be too high (although that, too, would require no Senate confirmation). And he's just an excrutiatingly obvious example of the kind of expertise that has been thrown over the side not just during the present Administration, but for the past four decades.